This is exactly why hiring on github repos is such a bad take.
Most of these developers, do their job, learn new stacks when the need arises to do so, their work is proprietary, and have hobbies completly unrelated to programming.
Most of these developers, do their job, learn new stacks when the need arises to do so, their work is proprietary, and have hobbies completly unrelated to programming.
This is critical to the discussion. In every industry you see people that live and breathe by their jobs, and why not. But especially in IT, there's this weird syndrome of "the revenge of the nerd" where many teenagers were nerdy and UNcool and now they're in tech and they can have big positions in big name companies and whatnot and it seems that working in Tech is the new metric for professional achievement.
And it's so easy to see the narrative as "only monomaniac nerds make it" because that's what we're told and what we hear. But the truth is, many more people are invisible because their work in tech is just a function/job/utility rather than a revenge over their own teenage years and/or a complete dedication.
I personally grew from the former category to the latter and I'm so much better in my life. YMMV as always.
Lots of developers have various degrees of that "revenge of the nerds" syndrome, but many (including myself) get over it somewhat as you get through a few waves of cool new tech fads, crunch times, and boring projects that have to get done and it just becomes a job to do.
For example, I've been participating and trading in prediction markets as a form of income during the pandemic. It was originally just a hobby but I was between jobs when the pandemic hit. I imagine many employers would be turned off by this (and still have no idea how to present this as I'd like to get back into tech). If only due to a lack of understanding as it is still a very small niche.
And most code and projects I produce aren't really worth the extra effort to present publicly and would only serve as a noisy hiring signal. Would anyone really think it's impressive to see dozens of hastily written disposable web scrapers for very specific details from niche data/news sources? Or some code to browse a dataset in Pandas? Probably not.